Hanes Walton Jr. Predecessor of Black Lives Matter

Hanes Walton Jr.

Savannah as other cities has intellectual centers that work as a brain trust for the city. Savannah of course has several of these Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia Historical Society, Telfair Museums, and Skidaway Island Institute of Oceanography to name a few. One of the oldest and most important centers is Savannah State University (SSU). A historical black university SSU was established in 1890. Since, it has provided not only the African American Community but the City of Savannah as a source for leadership and academic expertise.

SSU has given us two mayors: Edna Jackson,our current mayor Van R. Johnson and one of our most prominent civil rights leader and preservationists W. W. Law. SSU has also brought to Savannah renown professors who taught and brought change to the academic and other worlds. In this blog and several following blogs I will be looking at some of these men and women who taught if not their whole teaching careers at least spent significant years at SSU providing students and the city of Savannah with their intellectual gifts.

The first such person was Hanes Walton Jr. who taught at SSU for five years in the late sixties. He was to become an American political science and professor of African American Studies who pioneered the study of race in American politics. It is quite remarkable that such a prominent leader, the predecessor to the now ‘radical’ Critical Race Theory received his early teaching chops here in Savannah. He earned a PhD in Government at Howard University (the same place our current Vice President Kamala Harris graduated), graduating in 1967, the first person to ever receive a PhD in Government from Howard University.

With these credentials he would stress the need for the creation of African American politics as a necessary category of political science. Until his advocacy AfAm politics had not been studied as varied from general view of the majority (think white) issues in political science. But through his steady scientific study he is credited with the serious study of Black politics.

He was a prolific writer. He wrote at least twenty-five academic books. Some of his books on black politics included: "Invisible Politics: Black Political Behavior, American Political Parties," "The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King. Jr.," "When the Marching Stopped: The Politics of Civil Rights Regulatory Agencies," "Presidential Elections, 1789-2008," and the two-volume work, "The African American Electorate: A Statistical History."  His work began to push his fellow academics and educational institutions to accept the need for more work in Black studies in political science as well as other academic disciplines.

He became recognized by his peers as one of the foremost political scientists in the United States. Walton, served as the Vice President of the American Political Science Association. His work was recognized by several organizations. He was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship 1971, the Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellowship for Minority-Group Scholars in 1979, and a Ford foundation fellowship in 1982. 

The American Political Science Association named its prominent award in the study of racial and ethnic politics the Hanes Walton Award.  More recently the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) announced the establishment of the 2021 Hanes Walton, Jr. Award for Quantitative Methods Training. The award focuses on granting scholarships to the which provides scholarships to support participation in the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research. A study of which he could be called a pioneer in the field.

His advocacy for this change could be found in his helping establish the National Conference of Black Political Scientists in 1971. His writings sound much like the early days of critical race theory: “the relative paucity of disciplinary work that tends to support the struggle against racism, and the overwhelming influence of work that tends to support the maintenance of racism.” Imagine fifty years ago hearing his arguments that the academic disciplines themselves, with their pretense of objectivity and universality, constituted the very groundwork of racial violence and subordination. It was these norms and conventions that had to be upended in order to bring “a new self-loving, black presence into an old, white-created context” of the university.

Hanes Walton was arguably the most productive of the civil rights era generation of black political scientists. He was also incredibly humble. And he was open with his time – spending every Saturday laboring over the dozens of recommendation letters and tenure reviews he was routinely asked to write. Over the past 20 years, the University of Michigan has produced more black political scientists than any other institution. Almost all of those students bear his mark. — Lester Spence, Professor of Political Science and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University. 
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One can only imagine how Walton’s teachings at SSU during the sixties helped shape the “Civil Rights Mind” of Savannah. He would move on to teach at Atlanta University and spend most of his career at Michigan University but at a significant moment he was here in Savannah where his students and colleagues were exposed to the beginnings of his pioneering work on Black Political Science.

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Social Science Building at Savannah State University